Ad copy

Jennie Allen did everything the Bible said and was still plagued with anxiety for ten straight years. The reason had nothing to do with her faith, and almost every Christian woman is making the same mistake. Jennie Allen is one of the most trusted Bible teachers in America. She's the founder of IF:Gathering, a movement that has drawn more than a million Christian women. Her book Get Out of Your Head hit the New York Times bestseller list and has sold over a million copies. She holds a Masters in Biblical Studies from Dallas Theological Seminary. Millions of women hang on her words every single week. And she stood on a stage and admitted something most Bible teachers will never say out loud. She spent her entire twenties plagued with anxiety. Her word. Plagued. "I was plagued with anxiety... when I look back at my 20s my mind raced all the time. Trying to grab an identity. Trying to grab a place in people's lives. Trying to grab for people's approval. Trying to grab for meaning and purpose. Trying to grab for whatever could fill up my soul. I just wanted it and I was chasing the wind and I couldn't catch it." And here's the part that should stop us cold. She wasn't far from God while this was happening. She grew up in church. Her dad was an elder. She gave her life to Jesus at 17, went back to her high school, and started a little Bible study that same year. She prayed. She served. She obeyed. "I did not know what I was doing wrong, because I loved God and I had trusted him as my savior and I was doing my best to obey him." She had the same equation we were all handed. Love God. Obey him. Get the peaceful, abundant life he promised. And the equation wasn't working. "I would read verses like that and go, why is this not applying to my life?" Read that again. A woman who would go on to teach the Bible to millions was opening her Bible and watching the words just sit there. Not landing. Not changing anything. Not touching the anxiety. How many of us know exactly what that feels like. We love God. We pray. We show up. We do our best. And our minds still race at 2am over things we can't control. We've underlined the verses about peace. We have them on mugs and wall art and in our phone backgrounds. And the peace itself never quite arrives. So we quietly decide the problem must be us. Not enough faith. Not enough discipline. Not enough quiet time. Jennie decided that too. Then she came across a verse that made her angry. Matthew 16. Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. And in front of thousands of women, this seminary-trained Bible teacher said the thing almost nobody in church has the guts to say. "That verse, it's horrible. I hate it. I don't even know what it means. I don't know what it means... I'll push the button. Sign me up. I'll obey God. I want to obey God. I don't know how to do it." Sit with that for a second. A woman with a Masters in Biblical Studies, standing on a stage, admitting she read one of the most famous verses in the Bible and had no idea what it actually meant. Because if SHE can read the Bible and not understand it, what does that mean for the rest of us? Then she told a story that explains everything. A couple of years ago, Jennie went trapezing. She climbed a tiny ladder to the very top. Grabbed the bar. Swung out over the net. She said it was one of the scariest things she's ever done. And the scariest part wasn't the swinging. "Not only are you terrified... but you are holding on to a bar with all your might." Then the instructor told her she was ready for the real thing. Letting go of the bar mid-air, so the catcher could grab her arms. She refused. "I said, listen, that almost killed me... and they said, no, no, this is actually easier, because they're doing all the work." The catcher had done it a million times. "He'll watch your timing. He'll do it. He's got it. All you have to do is let go." All you have to do is let go. She couldn't. Five times she swung out, and five times her hands would not open. Because here is the truth about letting go that nobody ever tells us. Nobody lets go for a catcher they've never seen. And then Jennie said the sentence that diagnoses every white-knuckled Christian woman alive. "I believe one reason that we do not surrender is we don't know who we're dealing with. We don't know if we trust this God. We don't know if we let go and we let him catch us, that he's going to give us what we want." We don't know who we're dealing with. Not "we don't have enough faith." Not "we don't pray hard enough." We have never actually met the one doing the catching. I was that woman. I'd been a Christian for over twenty years, and I could not stop gripping. My kids. My marriage. Money. My health. What people thought of me. I prayed about all of it. And then picked all of it right back up the second I said amen. People told me to let go and let God. I heard it a hundred times. Not one person ever explained how. I tried reading my Bible to get closer to him. Every January, a new plan. Genesis was fine. Exodus got strange. By Leviticus I was reading about animal sacrifices, wondering what any of it had to do with my racing mind. By February the Bible was back on the nightstand, collecting dust next to the verses on my wall. And every time, the same quiet shame. Everyone else seems to understand this book. What is wrong with me? Here's what I finally learned. Nothing was wrong with me. It isn't motivation. It isn't discipline. It isn't weak faith. We cannot trust someone we've never been introduced to. And everything I knew about God was secondhand. A sermon here. A worship song there. Other people's stories about what he did in their lives. I had never once watched him catch anyone myself. Which is strange, because I owned the book where he does it on nearly every page. I just couldn't read it. Think about what the Bible actually is. Letters and stories written 2,000 to 3,500 years ago, in other languages, in cultures nothing like ours, to people facing situations nobody ever explained to us. Opening it cold and expecting it to make sense is like finding a letter written 2,000 years ago, to someone else, about a problem we were never told about, and wondering why it doesn't read like it was written this morning. It WAS written for us. We were just never given the context to see it. Jennie has spent her whole life trying to hand women courage from a stage. But a conference is two days. A podcast is forty minutes. She can make us want to let go. She can't sit with us at 6am, morning after morning, while we actually get to know the one who catches. That's when I found something that changed everything. A 52-week guided study that walks us through the entire Bible, one week at a time, from Genesis to Revelation. Before we read a single chapter each week, it tells us who wrote it, when, why, what was happening at the time, and what it actually means. And week by week, I finally got introduced. Luke. Where Peter watches Jesus fill his empty nets, and walks away from everything to follow him. Not because of the fish. Because of who filled them. For the first time, I understood why. Genesis. Not the Sunday school version. The story of a God who has been catching people since the very first page. Asking them to let go of homes, plans, and certainty, and proving himself underneath them every single time. Psalms. Written by people whose minds raced exactly like mine. The same 2am fears, three thousand years earlier. And the God who held them while they said every anxious thing out loud. And slowly, something I didn't expect started happening. I'd open it in the morning and not want to close it. Verses I'd read dozens of times suddenly meant something, because for the first time I actually understood them. Then one morning, I noticed it. A phone call came in. The kind that would normally spin me out for a week. And I was okay. Not because I muscled my way to calm. Because I finally knew who was underneath me. My hands just opened. I let go. Jennie says it like this. "Nothing sets you free like letting go." I used to hear that as one more instruction. One more thing I was failing at. Now I know it was never an instruction. It's what happens, almost on its own, once we actually know who's catching us. And that verse Jennie hated? The one she stood on a stage and admitted she couldn't understand? Whoever loses her life will find it. I know what it means now. Right now it's up to 62% off, and every order comes with a free pen pack. Don't spend another year holding on with all our might, terrified of what happens if we let go. Don't spend another year being a Christian woman who knows about God but has never actually watched him catch anyone on the page. Tap below and grab yours before they sell out.